A good morning walk on a nice Sunday in June can be ruined quickly when a choice to do something slightly off the routine is pointed out. It feels like I got caught. It isn’t anything important but it still flashes my mood down to the ground.

When I return from my morning animal duties, the routine traditionally ends with the review. My supervisor is on the couch drinking his banana smoothie and doing his version of the morning social media scrolling. I come in and report whatever facts and details I have remembered from the walk.

Usually, this entails lots of “all good” kinds of messages for the four checkpoints. 13 cows counted. No new calf. The merged yellow and black hens are not yet mingled but don’t seem to be pecking at each other, the 3 Orpington chicks are still freaking out about my appearance. Being in the barn is a big departure from our kitchen environment, where they were hatched. 

All is good. Like yesterday and the before. No change is good news on a farm.

He replies, asking about eggs. No eggs?

Yes I say. More than usual for a morning. The red hens are invading into yellow hen territory to lay eggs and then mostly retreating to the outer area to socialize with their kind.

He then follows up with; You didn’t bring them up?

Ouch. A simple request, no doubt delivered without any hidden meaning or malicious agenda, but to me, it meant something different.

This was an attack on my job. A change to the routine I wasn’t officially supposed to make. A break in the truth he puts in me to complete relatively simple daily tasks. Collect the eggs and bring them up to the fridge.

This could easily be interpreted by my brain as a fail. I’m not doing my job. What else am I skipping reach day? Does he need to double check my work? Are they really getting good and water everyday or will he miss those tasks too.

I project my failure into his brain as if this was a worst case scenario. In my head failures are points and they accumulate in other people’s heads over time. 

Sometimes I think people’s heads are filled with these kinds of obsessions just because mine is. It is quite conceivable that that question has already been forgotten in his mind and even though my decision to bring the eggs up in the afternoon shift is valid and not dangerous in any way and doesn’t affect the quality of the eggs, it still feels like I have failed him because he is the one that taught me the routine and I’m not following it to the letter. 

I won’t mention it.

Yes. I probably will at some point in the next few days, working it in to some conversation that I bring the eggs up in the afternoon because it fills the cartons and so I’m not walking the rounds with a carton of eggs under my arm.

My need to justify an imperceptible error is it’s own failure   but that is a whole different blog post.